Share this story In the early 1950s, the U.S. Navy asked an audacious question: what if a jet fighter did not need a runway, or even an aircraft carrier? What if it could simply take off from the open sea? Convair’s answer was one of the strangest warplanes ever flown...
Share this story Picture the view from the cockpit. The sea is a grey blur a hundred feet below, ripping past at well over 500 knots. The horizon barely moves; the world is a tunnel of speed. Most aircraft, this low and this fast, would be a snarling, twitchy handful,...
Share this story At the Farnborough air show in 1953, the crowd hears it before they see it. Ten engines, building from a hum to a roar, and then the largest all-metal flying boat ever built slides overhead — a silver whale of an aircraft, a 219-foot wing, an...
Share this story Two hours into the worst bike ride of his life, Bryan Allen is in trouble. His legs are cramping, he is dangerously dehydrated, and the French coast is still maddeningly far away. Worse, his “aircraft” is sinking — the turbulence...
Share this story It is 21 October 1929, and 169 people are about to do something no group of human beings has ever done: leave the ground together, in a single aircraft. On the surface of Lake Constance sits the reason — a flying boat so vast that the men...
Share this story On the morning of 2 September 1958, a four-engined transport drones eastward through the clear sky near the Turkish-Soviet border. To anyone who glanced up, it is just a C-130 Hercules — an unglamorous cargo hauler. It is not. Tail number 60528...
Share this story It is the morning of 7 January 1991, and Dick Cheney is about to do something a Defense Secretary almost never does. Standing at the Pentagon podium, the war in the Persian Gulf only days away, he announces that he is killing one of the Navy’s...
Share this story There are 21 B-2 Spirits in the world, and on any given day most of them are sitting in climate-controlled hangars in Missouri. So when one of these $2-billion flying wings turns up on the far side of the planet, it is never a coincidence. It is a...
Share this story For all its sophistication, the F-35 has carried an awkward secret: it could not sink a ship without compromising the one thing it is famous for. Any missile big enough to threaten a modern warship had to hang under the wings — and the moment it...
Share this story Try, today, to fly from Hong Kong to Almaty. You can’t — not directly. You go the long way, connecting through the Gulf, or Istanbul, or Moscow, turning a regional hop into a day-long ordeal. From early 2027, that finally changes. Cathay...
Share this story Somewhere over western Maryland on Saturday, a private pilot was having an ordinary flight — right up until a fighter jet appeared off the wingtip. Around 12:20 p.m. on 20 June 2026, a small general-aviation aircraft wandered into a Temporary...
Share this story Most of what an air force does in secret stays secret. Occasionally, though, the secret taxis past a photographer in broad daylight. That is what happened at RAF Akrotiri, where the British Ministry of Defence has just released official photographs of...
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